The intention behind this decision is to shield women’s alleged right to abort against possible limitations that could be established by future governments, more sensitive to respect for human life.
The reform now approved has been presented by French politicians from almost the entire political spectrum as a conquest of freedom for women, who will finally be able to “dispose of their bodies” without restrictions.
But is the recognition of the right to abort and including it in the Magna Carta of a nation, which must safeguard the rights and respect for the dignity of all its citizens, really an advance in civilization?
Excluding unborn, immature, weak and defenseless human beings from the duty of custody and defense of their rights cannot in any case be presented as an achievement of progress but, rather, as a regression.
The politicians who now celebrate in France excluding from the Magna Carta that defends the rights of all, those most in need of custody and protection, have contributed to forging a colossal setback: that of normalizing the extermination of the weak, of those who cannot defend themselves, from those who absolutely depend on others.
The historical antecedents of civilizations that have trampled on the human rights recognized today, the first of which is the right to life, show us that their destiny is decadence, the weakening of social structures and, finally, their extinction.
The horror that occurs in us when we contemplate extermination camps, genocides of all kinds, slavery or any other form of violence by the strong on the weak, now seems anesthetized in the face of the enormous tragedy that is the normalization of the fact that a mother ends up deliberately with the life of his defenseless child before being born.
Appealing to a woman’s right over her own body to legitimize the practice of abortion is to ignore reality, falsify it or manipulate it. When a woman directly and intentionally attacks the life of her child, whom she carries, she does not act on her body, but on the body and life of another human being, individual and different from her, with her own biography, whom she welcomes and nourishes in its womb.
Ignoring this fact is the necessary step to admit that killing is not killing. Those who enslaved also did so with their slaves, whom they considered things, which they could buy or sell, or kill, without this constituting any crime. Or the Hutus against the Tutsis, when in the Rwandan genocide they called their enemies cockroaches before taking their lives without any remorse.
Recent history also shows us sad examples of how man attacks man with impunity when he previously withdraws his personal status: he is not one of mine, he has no rights, his life is worth nothing.
Being born in France will now be a little more complicated. It already is in many countries, like ours, where ending the life of a human embryo or fetus does not require any justification, beyond the will of the woman who aborts.
But now the French have protected the right to kill the weakest. They don’t want to go back. However, they walk backwards.
OmnesJérôme Lejeune, whose death we celebrate the thirtieth anniversary, a distinguished scientist and geneticist, defender of human life from conception, already warned about this: “The quality of a civilization is measured by the respect it professes to the weakest of its members. ”.
France is going backwards, with the practical consensus of its politicians and the majority of its citizens, in the quality of its civilization, repeating historical violations of human dignity that we thought had been overcome.
My condolences for this regressive attack against man, which extinguishes his freedom in the name of freedom.
Julio Tudela – Bioethics Observatory – Life Sciences Institute – Catholic University of Valencia
Article published in the newspaper El Levante. 03/06/2024
